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America's Test Kitchen is a real 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three dozen full­time cooks and product testers. Our mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, we test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most­ foolproof recipe. America’s Test Kitchen's online cooking school is based on nearly 20 years of test kitchen work in our own facility, on the recipes created for Cook's Illustrated magazine, and on our two public television cooking shows.

Turning flour, water, and yeast into crusty, airy rolls is one of the hardest bits of kitchen wizardry around. But there are few things more delicious than homemade dinner rolls, especially when you wrap them up in a towel, place them in a pretty basket, and serve them with a hearty home-cooked meal.

We wanted to make the process foolproof to be sure you could enjoy this simple pleasure without frustration. To get a flavorful dinner roll recipe with a crisp crust and chewy crumb without a steam-injected oven, we replaced a few tablespoons of bread flour with whole-wheat flour and added honey. For an airy crumb, we determined exactly how much water and yeast would produce bubbly yet shapely rolls. A two-step baking process—baking the rolls in a cake pan to set their shape before pulling them apart to crisp up—gave our rustic dinner roll recipe the crust we were looking for.
See the steps in the gallery above.

Rustic Dinner Rolls(Makes 16 rolls)

Because this dough is sticky, keep your hands well floured when handling it. Use a spray bottle to mist the rolls with water. The rolls will keep for up to 2 days at room temperature stored in a zipper-lock bag. To re-crisp the crust, place the rolls in a 450-degree oven 6 to 8 minutes. The rolls will keep frozen for several months wrapped in foil and placed in a large zipper-lock bag. Thaw the rolls at room temperature and re-crisp using the instructions above.

1. Whisk water, yeast, and honey in bowl of stand mixer until well combined, making sure no honey sticks to bottom of bowl. Add flours and mix on low speed with dough hook until cohesive dough is formed, about 3 minutes. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature 30 minutes.

4. Transfer dough to floured work surface, sprinkle top with more flour. Using bench scraper, cut dough in half and gently stretch each half into 16-inch cylinders. Divide each cylinder into quarters, then each quarter into 2 pieces (you should have 16 pieces total), and dust top of each piece with more flour. With floured hands, gently pick up each piece and roll in palms to coat with flour, shaking off excess, and place in prepared cake pan.

Arrange 8 dough pieces in each cake pan, placing one piece in middle and others around it, with long side of each piece running from center of pan to edge and making sure cut-side faces up. Loosely cover cake pans with plastic wrap and let rolls rise until doubled in size, about 30 minutes (dough is ready when it springs back slowly when pressed lightly with finger). Thirty minutes before baking, adjust rack to middle position and heat oven to 500 degrees.

Dinner rolls are simply things one eats out of desperation at restaurants when the service is slow, or when your compatriots think that 8 pm is a decent eating hour. They're certainly not something I'd ever make at home.